


love still lives

by mercurybard



Category: Nochnoy Dozor | Night Watch (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-12
Updated: 2011-06-12
Packaged: 2017-10-20 08:51:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/210957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mercurybard/pseuds/mercurybard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She has had the same song stuck in her head for 60 years</p>
            </blockquote>





	love still lives

**Author's Note:**

> Night Watch belongs to people who aren't me. I make no profit from or claim to this.

They bound her into the shape of a stuffed owl, wrapped her in plastic, and put her in a cupboard for sixty years. The idea was that she have time to ruminate on her broken vows. To give her actual owl-shape would have defeated the purpose of the punishment, for a shapeshifter had to be ever vigilant against losing their mind to the feral instincts of the animal whose form they assumed. They wanted her to keep her faculties, locked in her own mind.

It had worked better than her captors could ever have imagined. _love still lives in a wounded heart_ \- the words had echoed around the inside her head for decades. Even those brief hours when Geser took her out to let her fight in whatever war the Others had momentarily embroiled themselves in, she could not shake the song. She found herself humming it as she cut down werewolves and vampires, a half hour at a time. Then, when the spell sucked her back into her imprisoning form, her screeches were to the tune of it.

The Комитет государственной безопасности had never devised a method of torture so effective as her little ear worm. She did not know why she offered to sing for Anton as he headed into the heart of the vortex of damnation (and then proceeded to do so before he had a chance to respond). Anton was far easier to focus on than Geser, whose eyes she can feel on her back as they move about the little flat the Night Watch had usurped as a field base. Anton did not stand near the door during her trial and watch with tired eyes and a silent mouth as she was sentenced to feathered exile in a cupboard. No, he found her women's clothes and argued with his pet vampire in the hall and reeked of cheap vodka and fresh blood and didn't stare at her breasts in the bath. Maybe, when this was all done--if they survived--she would drag him out for a drink at some hole-in-the-wall bar. One drink would turn to two to three to them buying the whole bottle and staggering back to Anton's flat, leaning against one another. The bar would have a jukebox or at least a radio or Anton would slur some drunken tune...anything to chase away the song and clear her head.


End file.
